Ramnaresh Shakya

I didn’t know that I was travelling towards a moment that would stay with me for the rest of my life.

When we reached my grandmother’s house in our village, I saw crowds of people everywhere. Relatives and villagers had gathered. I could hear people crying. There was so much sadness in the air, but I don’t think my little mind understood what it meant.

I went inside and saw everyone crying.

And I didn’t cry.

I remember sitting in the lobby, watching people around me break down. Somewhere in my mind, I knew my father had died, but my heart wasn’t ready to accept it. I didn’t know what I was supposed to do. I didn’t know how a little girl was supposed to react when the person she loved most in the world was suddenly gone.

Then one of my aunts took me to my mother.

My mother was crying so much.

The moment I saw her, something inside me broke. I started crying too. My cousins were crying, everyone was crying, and suddenly the reality of what had happened began to reach me.

My papa was gone.

I don’t remember every detail of that day. But I remember the feeling of being a child in a room full of grief, surrounded by people who understood a pain I was only beginning to discover.

I wish I could go back and hold that little girl for a moment. I wish I could tell her that it wasn’t her fault that she couldn’t cry at first. She was just a child. She loved her father, and she didn’t know how to live in a world without him.

I don’t have as many memories of my father as I wish I had. Sometimes that hurts in a way I can’t explain. I wish I could remember his voice more clearly, his everyday habits, the little things he said to me. I wish I had more time with him.

But the memories I do have are precious. They are small moments, ordinary moments that probably didn’t seem extraordinary at the time. Now, they mean everything to me.

I was always closer to my father than to my mother. He loved his daughter so much. He encouraged me in my studies and in life. He was proud of me, and he made me feel that I could do things, that I could become someone, that I was capable of more than I knew.

I was so happy with him.

One memory that I will always carry happened during my summer vacation. I was staying at my aunt’s house in the village, and my cousins and I had gone to a wedding. My vacation was almost over, and school was about to start again. My father came to the wedding to attend it and take me home.

I was on the terrace, playing with my cousins, when I suddenly saw him in the evening.

I ran towards him.

“Papa! Papa!”

I remember running as fast as I could and hugging him.

That was all I wanted. To see him. To run to him. To be in his arms.

I wish I could return to that moment, even for a few seconds. I wish I could feel that hug again, knowing what I know now. Back then, I didn’t know that one day I would miss something as simple as seeing my father walk into a room.

I was just a little girl running towards her papa.

And he was there.

There is another memory I return to often.

My mother had gone to a wedding with my two brothers. I couldn’t take much time off school, so I was supposed to join them later with my father. It was just the two of us at home for a while.

My father would take care of me, feed me, get me ready for school, and make sure I was looked after. I was so young, but I remember feeling safe with him.

One evening, he had gone out for work, and I developed a terrible fever and headache. I was at home crying because the pain was so bad.

Then I saw him coming from the balcony.

I started crying out to him, telling him how much my head hurt and asking him to take me with him.

He came to me and took me to the doctor. He looked after me.

It may sound like such a small memory to someone else. A father coming home from work and taking his sick daughter to the doctor. But for me, it is one of the clearest pictures I have of what his love felt like.

I remember being happy whenever I saw him coming home. I remember how proud he made me feel. I remember the comfort of knowing that he was there.

As a child, I thought those moments would always be part of my life. I didn’t know that one day I would spend years wishing I could experience them just once more.

I remember another time when my father’s treatment was going on and he was staying with my grandmother in our village. He was surrounded by nature, fresh air, and home-cooked food.

There was a wedding, and my mother and us children went to my grandmother’s house.

I was so excited to see my papa.

As soon as I arrived, I asked my grandmother where he was. She told me he had gone for a walk in the fields.

So I went looking for him.

And then I saw him, walking among the crops, surrounded by the fields.

I ran towards him.

“Papaaaa!”

I remember how happy I felt seeing him there.

I wish I could remember more of what happened that day. I wish I could remember what he said to me, whether he smiled when he saw me running towards him, and what it felt like to walk beside him.

But some of the details are gone now.

What remains is the feeling.

The excitement of finding him. The happiness of being near him. The love of a little girl who just wanted to be with her father.

I wonder sometimes whether he knew how much those moments would mean to me one day. Whether he knew that even after all these years, I would still be searching for him in my memories.

Watching my father suffer from cancer is something I will never forget.

He was so young. He had so much life ahead of him. I remember seeing him in terrible pain, moving and jumping on the bed because he couldn’t bear it. I remember him throwing up and suffering through his treatment.

I was a child. I couldn’t understand the illness, and I couldn’t do anything to make it better.

I could only watch.

And pray.

God, please make my papa better. Please take away his pain. If he has to suffer, please let me do something. Please don’t let him hurt like this.

I didn’t have the words to understand what was happening to him. I only knew that someone I loved was hurting, and I wanted the pain to stop.

There is something especially heartbreaking about being a child and watching a parent suffer. You want to help, but you don’t know how. You want to protect them, but you are too small to protect anyone. You want to believe that everything will be okay because your father is supposed to be the person who makes everything okay.

I don’t know if I ever truly understood how much pain he was in until I grew older.

Now, when I think about those days, I wish he hadn’t had to suffer so much. I wish his treatment had worked. I wish I could have had more time with him.

Most of all, I wish he could have stayed.

After my father died, our life changed.

It felt as though the world had lost its colours. Everything that had once felt familiar became different. Our home was different. Our family was different. Even happiness felt different.

My mother was still so young when she lost her husband. She had children to raise, a family to take care of, and a life she had never imagined she would have to manage alone. She had lost the person she had built her life with, and somehow she had to find the strength to carry on.

I watched my mother cry.

We cried together. We cried again and again, for days that turned into months and months that turned into years. Grief became part of our family life. At family gatherings, memories of my father would come up, and people would start crying again. My grandmother, my aunts, my mother, and all of us carried our own pieces of the same loss.

I cannot imagine how difficult those years were for my mother. She had to become both parents to us. She had to keep going even when she was hurting. She had to find a way to raise her children while carrying a heartbreak of her own.

She was strong, but I know that strength did not mean she wasn’t suffering.

I think about the life we might have had if my father were still here. I think about how different things might have been for my mother. How much easier some days might have felt. How it would have been to grow up with both parents beside us.

There are so many moments when I wish he had been there.

For a long time, I dreamed about my father coming home.

Sometimes, in my dreams, he was alive again. We were all together, living happily, as if nothing had happened. I would see him and feel that familiar happiness, and for a little while, everything felt right.

Other times, I would see him in my dreams and start crying.

Even now, after so many years, I still sometimes see him when I sleep.

I don’t know how to explain what it feels like to dream about someone you have lost. For a little while, they are there. You can see them. You can be near them. You can feel the happiness of having them back, even if only inside a dream.

And then you wake up.

The world is the same world you left before you fell asleep. They are still gone.

Sometimes, it feels as though you have lost them all over again.

My siblings, my mother, and I have learned to live without him. Life continued, because life does that, even when your heart is not ready for it.

We grew older. We had our own experiences, our own struggles, our own happy moments. My mother kept going and did everything she could for us.

But growing older has also made me understand what I lost.

When I was little, I missed my papa because I wanted him to come home. I wanted him to feed me, take care of me, and be there when I needed him.

Now, I miss him in different ways.

I wonder what he would think of the person I have become. I wonder whether he would still be proud of me. I wonder what advice he would give me when life gets difficult. I wonder what it would feel like to tell him about my life, my dreams, the places I have seen, and the things I still want to do.

I wish I could call him and hear his voice.

I wish I could sit beside him and talk about nothing in particular.

I wish he could see me growing up.

Sometimes, it is not even about a big moment or an important occasion. It is the little things that hurt the most. The ordinary days when you suddenly remember that the person you want to share something with is no longer here.

Whenever I go home and look at his photographs or watch old videos of him, I find myself crying. I look at his face and think about how much life we have lived without him, how much has changed, and how many memories we have made that he will never know about.

I can see him in those photographs, but I cannot reach him.

And that is one of the hardest things about losing someone you love. You can remember their face, look at their pictures, hear stories about them, and carry them in your heart. But you cannot go back and be with them.

You cannot make new memories.

You can only hold on to the ones you have.

People sometimes think that when enough years pass, grief becomes smaller and eventually disappears.

But I don’t think grief works that way.

We have spent so many years missing my father. We have cried for him so many times. We have remembered him at family gatherings, in conversations, in photographs, in dreams, and in the quiet moments when something suddenly reminds us of him.

We have learned to live our lives, but that doesn’t mean we have stopped missing him.

Sometimes I think about the little girl I was when he died. The girl who sat in the lobby, watching everyone cry, not knowing how to react. The girl who had prayed throughout a train journey for God to save her father. The girl who ran towards him shouting “Papa!” whenever she saw him.

I wish I could tell her that her love for him would never disappear.

I wish I could tell her that it was okay not to understand what was happening. That she didn’t need to know how to grieve. That she was allowed to be confused, to cry, to feel nothing for a moment, and then to miss him with her whole heart.

I wish I could tell her that she would grow up and carry him with her, even in ways she wouldn’t understand until much later.

Because that is what happened.

I grew up, but a part of me is still that little girl who wants her father.

I still miss the way he made me feel safe. I still miss his love. I still wish I had more memories of him. I still wonder what my life would have been like if he had lived.

And sometimes, I still dream that he comes home.

For a few moments, I get to see my papa again.

I get to feel happy again.

I get to believe that we are all together, that our home has its colours back, that my mother is not carrying everything alone, and that my father is still there, somewhere close to us.

Then I wake up, and I remember.

He is gone.

But his love is still part of me.

I may not remember every conversation, every hug, or every ordinary day we spent together. I was too young. Time has taken away some of those details.

But time has not taken away the feeling of running towards him. It has not taken away the happiness I felt when he came home from work, or the comfort of knowing that he was there to take care of me.

It has not taken away the little girl who loved her papa more than she knew how to express.

I wish he could have stayed long enough for me to grow up beside him. I wish he could have seen all the years that came after him. I wish my mother hadn’t had to be so strong so young. I wish we had been given more time.

But if there is one thing I know, it is that he was loved.

He was loved when I prayed for him on that train. He was loved when I ran across the fields to find him. He was loved when I ran into his arms at the wedding. He was loved when I watched him suffer and wished I could take his pain away.

And he is still loved now, all these years later.

My father died when I was a little girl, but I have carried him with me into the woman I have become.

I don’t know if grief ever truly leaves us when we lose someone who was such a big part of our world.

Maybe we simply learn to live with the space they leave behind.

Maybe we spend our lives finding them in little things — in photographs, in dreams, in the stories our family tells, and in memories that suddenly return when we least expect them.

And maybe love is what remains when everything else has changed.

I still miss him and I always will.